Anthropology P380:

The transition from foraging to food production: examples from the Near East

Last time we discussed how after the height of the last glaciation, ca. 18,000 years ago, we see evidence of real economic specialization -- almost entrepreneurship ! People re-occupying regions with the retreat of the glaciers (e.g. in northern Europe) and taking advantage of rapidly changing ecological conditions.

In general this period is referred to as the Mesolithic (Epi-Paleolithic=North Africa & Near East; Microlithic= sub-Saharan Africa; Hoabinhian=SE Asia; Jomon=Japan; Archaic=N. America... etc!) It has been called "broad spectrum" exploitation -- but a bit of a misnomer, since they seem to specialize in staple foods...

= characterized by some technological changes indicative of FOOD SHIFTS

microlithic tools, bow & arrow

grinding /pounding equipment (early in Australia, North Africa)

first pottery containers in Japan (Jomon culture, 13,000bp)

... technologies that allow the intensification of exploitation of hard-to-get resources, such as seeds, nuts. Bryan Hayden argues this allowed creation of abundant/stable resource base that could not be affected by socio-economic competition using resources

"Complex hunter-gatherers" focus on abundant, widely available resources... with abundant offspring and short maturation times (r-selected species)... such as salmon, insects, grass seeds, nuts.... over-exploitation almost impossible to pre-industrial technologies = "collectors" (Binford) or "accumulators" (Hayden).

goals:

resilience

risk reduction

amelioration of environmental extremes

increased resource predictability & productivity

solutions :

diversification of resource base through intensification

labor intensive foods

storage = collecting, moving goods to consumers

farming = ultimate collector strategy

Example = Near East ("Levant") where we see a shift from relatively mobile, small band (egalitarian?) hunter-gatherers (Kebaran culture) to settled "hamlet" communities of hunter-gatherers increasingly dependent on harvesting and storing wild cereals, in addition to hunting, the Natufian culture... exploiting a rich, and very diverse resource base, some Natufians were able to accumulate wealth, and we see the first real evidence of social hierarchies... "haves" and "have-nots." But they were NOT agriculturalists -- they didn't PLANT foods, they harvested wild ones, and they didn't keep domestic animals, they hunted.

Archaeological evidence has been used to demonstrate the origins of food production occurred independently in a number of different regional "centers of domestication" around the world. For example (not a complete list!)

influenced by fieldwork with hunter-gatherers in the 1960's and characterization of the "original affluent society" at Man the Hunter conference

e.g. Population Pressure: E. Boserup first suggested that population growth could be an independent variable responsible for economic changes e.g. grow food to feed mouths. Then Mark Cohen took up the cry..."Prehistoric Food Crisis" -- argued that it wasn't population density per se, but the saturation of locat environments, so that emigration was no longer a viable solution...should be detectable archaeologically